Friday, March 21, 2008

To troubleshoot a printer

[Dated 13/03/2008]

Yifen's printer had been giving her problems since last night: the paper refused to load into the printer and print. She thought that the printer was dead, and now we need to get another one.

When I looked at the printer, it really didn't load the paper in properly somehow, and it couldn't print as a result.

So in order to find out why the paper wasn't loading...
Tried to "guide" the paper in: failed.
Tried to open the front panel of the printer and look for jammed stuff inside: nothing found.

Thought the paper was too damp from the constant raining these few days, and thus becoming too soft to be loaded properly. =O Tried loading a different set of paper: failed.

Then I noticed that the paper was jamming in an odd (and consistent) way: it always tilted to the right when loading, before it stopped there. So the only reason left was that there's something jamming the printer from that end, on the left side...

Succumbing to desperation and curiosity, I put away my common sense and inserted my hand into the printer feeder's left portion (whilst it was trying to load more paper!), and as expected, I felt something furry in there...

Thought it was a dustball that was stuck there somehow. But it sure felt BIG. How could a dustball of such a size appear so suddenly? And in a printer?

I managed to grab an endge of the "dustball", hoping to pull it out to remove bit by bit, and guess what I found instead?

Some used tissue paper...that had somehow flown in and gotten lodged in the printer! -_-

Moral of the story: never leave used tissue paper lying around, especially on printers. Heh.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I'm currently having the same problem now, but I can't get the tissue out of my laser printer. It appears to be lodged deep into the spindle where my fingers can't get a grip on the whole tissue. This really sucks, but good to know that it's not just me and 'hard luck'.